


Prayer

by Matril



Category: The Autobiography of Jane Eyre
Genre: Angst, Gen, Internal Monologue, i'm not crying, not at all, sob
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:09:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1586141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Matril/pseuds/Matril
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of the turmoil Jane might be going through during and after the hospital trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prayer

Jane couldn’t sleep.

She was exhausted beyond reason, but sleep refused to come. Every time she shut her eyes, her mind cruelly brought up the vision of a severely injured man in a hospital bed. 

Over the past few months, Jane had indulged in more a few fantasies about reuniting with Rochester. She never told anyone about them, and certainly never mentioned it on her videos. It was hard enough wrestling with her own thoughts. Putting it into words would only make it worse.

They were only ever fantasies, and she knew they couldn’t become real. She had to move on, as a healthy, mature, self-respecting individual. Fantasies were idle, mostly harmless things as long as they were only passing through the landscape of her brain. If she allowed them to settle in and take up permanent residence, it would become unbearable. She never let them get that far. 

Sometimes she imagined herself going back to him. Sometimes he came to her. Sometimes they met by random chance in a public place. Whatever the scenario, there were always happy tears and embraces and promises that this time, everything would be different. It seldom went any farther than that. Because even her vivid imagination could not summon up a way to make this plausible. The problems were still there. All the cracks in their relationship remained, with no way to repair them. She imagined reunions, but there was no future. Just those first few minutes of fevered bliss.

Among all her fantasies, she never imagined it would happen in a hospital, holding Adele’s shaking hand while she stood at the bedside of his broken body.

Jane was shaking too, but Adele’s fear was more urgent, more important, so she focused all her emotional resources on reassuring her. She answered Adele’s questions in a voice that surprised her with its steadiness, explaining the presence of various medical equipment in terms that a precocious nine-year-old could understand. Her tone wasn’t detached or clinical, but nor was it the frantic grief of a loved one. It was the voice of a caretaker. She found she was desperately grateful for that role, a role she could use to shield herself from the wave of emotions threatening to rise up and drown her.

“Why is he asleep?” Adele said, a question so simple and heartrending compared to all the others. Jane squeezed her hand.

“It’s easier for the body to handle pain while unconscious,” she said. Silently she thought, And there was the added benefit of not having to wonder what to say to him. She didn’t know the right words yet. Maybe she never would.

None of her fantasies had contained this horrible ambivalence. Would he recover? Was there some other as-yet undiagnosed injury? How long would Adele need her? When could she go back home without feeling like she was abandoning them?

Or did she want to?

Where was home, anyway?

It certainly wasn’t the hotel across the street from the hospital, and yet the poignant feelings that washed over Jane as she and Adele settled into bed were something very like home, something she had missed intensely even amid all the warm and welcoming generosity at the Rivers’ house. She had missed Adele so much, missed having this little person who needed her.

She had missed Rochester too. Of course she had. She still missed him. Looking at him unconscious in a hospital bed was no kind of reunion. He wasn’t really there.

Fear gripped her chest, cold and unrelenting in the dark as she lay awake, long after Adele had drifted into slumber. She hadn’t made any kind of decisions about staying or leaving. She needed time and better understanding. If the decision was taken away from her – if his condition worsened and –

She didn’t want to make her choices based on desperation, on the necessity of impending death. That wouldn’t be fair. 

She didn’t know where she wanted to be. She didn’t know how she felt about Rochester; how, or if, to rearrange her life after all these changes.

She only knew she wanted him to live. For a hundred reasons. For Adele. For Grace. For him. For her? Yes, even if she never saw him again, knowing he was alive in the world would be a gift.

The time for fantasies and half-formed dreams had passed. She needed to envision futures, spanning beyond a few minutes into days, weeks, months and years. Lifetimes. 

She prayed.

_Take care of him. Give him a second chance. Please._

With that, she finally fell asleep.


End file.
